League Work Research Articles

The Investigation into the Traffic in Women by the League of Nations: Sociological Jurisprudence as an International Social Project

During the interwar period, the League of Nations led an international campaign against traffic in women. Although important research about the League's work has started to appear, historians have concentrated on the “white slave trade” in the decades before the First World War. From 1924 to 1926, the League conducted the first intercontinental study to determine the number of women caught up in the traffic, and to map the strategies and routes used by traffickers. Undercover investigators visited more than 100 cities across Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Americas. The investigators talked to thousands of prostitutes, pimps, brothel-keepers, and others engaged in the sex trade. The “worldwide” investigation was not only the most significant aspect of the antitrafficking campaign in the interwar years, but also of the League's effort to build an international legal regime on a foundation of sociological jurisprudence.

Twists, Turns and Dead Alleys: The League of Nations and Intellectual Cooperation in Times of War

Twists, Turns and Dead Alleys: The League of Nations and Intellectual Cooperation in Times of War In recent years, historians of international organisations have asserted a strong continuity between pre- and post-war organisations. This article examines the wartime transitions in the field of intellectual cooperation and traces the fate of the League's International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation (CICI) and its executive arm, the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IICI) in Paris. Even though both the CICI and the IICIC were officially dormant after 1940, representatives of intellectual cooperation such as Henri Bonnet, James T. Shotwell and Gilbert Murray sought ways to continue their work. During the war, such initiatives seemed most promising in the Western hemisphere, where Latin American and US American protagonists planned to continue the League's work in Havana. Paradoxically, the increased importance of intellectual cooperation and cultural exchange and especially the engagement of the US and the British governments towards 1945 led to a break with the League's institutions, which were perceived as too weak. The postwar organisation UNESCO was in fact built on a different, more strictly inter-governmental basis than the League's ICO and also pursued different aims that reflected the shifts in global alliances.

The radical camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951

Artists in the Photo League, active from 1936 to 1951, were known for capturing sharply revealing, compelling moments from everyday life. Their focus centered on New York City and its vibrant streets-a newsboy at work, a brass band on a bustling corner, a crowded beach at Coney Island. Though beautiful, the images harbor strong social commentary on issues of class, child labor, and opportunity. The Radical Camera explores the fascinating blend of aesthetics and social activism at the heart of the Photo League, tracing the group's left-leaning roots and idealism to the worker-photography movement in Europe. Influenced by mentors Lewis Hine, Berenice Abbott, and Paul Strand, artists in the Photo League worked within a unique complex comprising a school, a darkroom, a gallery, and a salon, in which photography was discussed as both a means for social change and an art form. The influence of the Photo League artists on modern photography was enormous, ushering in the New York School. Presenting 150 works of the members of the Photo League alongside complementary essays that offer new interpretations of the League's work, ideas, and pedagogy, this beautifully illustrated book features artists including Margaret Bourke-White, Sid Grossman, Morris Engel, Lisette Model, Ruth Orkin, Walter Rosenblum, Aaron Siskind, W. Eugene Smith, and Weegee, among many others.

Notes from a Guerrilla

I joined the League of Women Voters, where I was immediately drawn to several young women, most of them university wives and newcomers like myself. I remember how we lookedbell-bottomed jeans, boots, ponchos. One of us actually drove a Volkswagen bus. We saw ourselves as women on the fringes of hippiedom who had married responsible young men with ambition and commitment to the patriarchal family system we'd all grown up in, and we knew we needed each other. Within a few weeks, we'd called for a meeting separate from the League's work. We hoped at least a few women would show up, but that evening my friend's small living room was packed so that women sat on the floor and leaned against the walls. As the aroma of spiced cider filled the room and firelight spilled out onto our faces, each woman spoke of why she had come, of what she wanted. I felt my heart curl up with emotion and then release. Women spoke! Eventually, ten of us coalesced into a permanent group, which met every week for years to engage in what we then called consciousness-raising. Early in our history, one of the husbands coined the name guerrillas in honor of our somewhat covert activities, although that first year we marched with our children in the local Christmas

Imperialism, colonialism and the new science of nutrition: The Tanganyika experience, 1925–1945

The League of Nations is generally remembered as the ineffective forerunner of the United Nations. It is seldom acknowledged for the groundbreaking work it sponsored in the 1920s and 30s in the then new science of nutrition. The League's work resulted in the first internationally-recognized table of dietary standards. The information collected through the League's research was applied primarily to improving the health of industrial workers in European nations. However, member nations, such as Great Britain, were required to conduct nutrition surveys in their overseas territories. British administrative policies in Africa were a key factor in precipitating the shortages for at least one ethnic group, the Sukuma of northwest Tanganyika. The Sukuma were unable to maintain their precolonial subsistence system under the pressure of colonial taxation. The gradual degeneration of subsistence production altered the quality of the Sukuma diet. Colonial medical officers assumed that these crisis diets were the “traditional” African diets. This assumption combined with the general racist attitudes of the period precluded the application of the League's research to African populations under British administration.

The League of Nations: Its Life and Times, 1920-1946

Preface This book is an account of a world-wide organisation, the League of Nations, which came into existence in January 1920 and held its last meeting in April 1946, and its efforts to preserve world peace in one of the most tempestuous periods in modern history. The League failed, and some of the reasons for this are--given here. Nevertheless, during the Second World War none of the countries ranged against the Axis Powers doubted that after the war the struggle must be taken up again, this time with the United Nations Organisation, the headquarters of which, appropriately, were to be in New York. Yet today, after forty years, in which peace has been precariously maintained, the United Nations is almost as ' much a lost cause as the League was in the late 1930s. Its non-political work for economic and social co-operation, for aiding the developing countries, for health and education, drug control, and so on, continue, as did that of the League until the bitter end. But, as instruments for the collective maintenance of peace, the world now relies upon methods which the League and the UN were intended to supersede. Is there something basically false in the idea that the nations can combine their efforts to smother threats to world peace from whatever quarter they come? Must we rest content with a system (if indeed it be a system) of collective defence and balance of power which failed to prevent war in 1914 and again in 1939, and which, if it failed again, could hardly ensure the survival of our civilisation? This book examines the reasons why collective security in the period between the two world wars failed, and tries to assess how far this was a failure in the formula for collective security devised at the Paris peace conference in 1919, or of the inclemencies of the epoch in which the League existed, or of its human instruments, the men and (more in the background of affairs in those days) women who sought to make the system work, and, in some cases, to defeat it. The book therefore attempts to be more than a historical record, though it uses primary historical sources, especially on the British side, Britain having been, at all times, the most important League member and the country to which responsibility for the League's experience chiefly attaches. It is the study of an experiment, the failure of which shook the world. The book cannot hope to do more than examine the more important of the League's activities since the League's story is that of the world, in a truer sense than is that of the United Nations. But its subject is the collective maintenance of peace, and the League's work is always regarded from that perspective. For all its helplessness in the late 1930s, the League of Nations, wrote one of its most fervent supporters, the physicist Madame Curie, 'has a grandeur that commands our support'.

Strengthen the League in the Second Year of Junior High School

The present disjointedness between the Communist Youth League (CYL) and Young Pioneers organizations in junior high schools has become an outstanding problem seriously affecting the League's work of laying a foundation in these schools.

Reform CYL Work to Adapt to the New Situation

The primary task of the Communist Youth League (CYL) in the rural areas at present is to guide, encourage, and support young people to be representatives of the advanced productive forces; the stress of the League's work should be laid on specialized households and science-and-technology demonstration households.

Non-Political Work of the League of Nations

A REPORT by the Secretary-General on the work of the League of Nations (July–mid-November, 1939), which has just been issued, is an immediate sequel to the regular report on the work of the League, 1938–39; but is the first of a series which will be published periodically to keep the States Members informed of the progress of the League's work (League of Nations. Report on the Work of the League (Continuation), July–mid-November, 1939. (Official No. A.6(a), 1939.) Pp. 62. (Geneva: League of Nations; London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1939.) ls. 6d.). The report shows that with certain exceptions—the European Conference on Rural Life, which was to have met at Geneva in October, for example, had to be postponed sine die—the League has been able to carry on, in spite of the War, its essential activities in the non-political fields in which it has been responsible for so much successful and constructive work in recent years. For the development of international co-operation in economic and social affairs, the creation of a Central Committee to direct and supervise the work of the League's Committees dealing with those questions has been recommended and a draft constitution submitted for the approval of the Assembly.

League of Nations

“The League from Year to Year (1938)”, which has recently been issued by the Information Section of the Secretariat of the League of Nations, contains the usual concise account of the year's activities in sufficient detail to facilitate careful study of the political, legal and technical work of the various organs of the League of Nations. (Geneva: League of Nations; London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1939. Pp. 214. 1s.). Of special interest to scientific workers are the chapters on intellectual co-operation, the health organization, the communications and transit organization and those on the European conference on rural life and technical collaboration with China. A chapter dealing with refugees is included as well as one on mandates. The detailed chronological table of the principal events in the League's sphere of activity during the year, giving the dates of the meetings of the different organs of the League and of their principal decisions, as well as of world political events affecting the League's work introduced last year for the first time is again a feature of the new edition.

Report on work of the National municipal league. For the year ending October 1, 1928

AbstractThis report shows a steady growth in the League's work and accomplishment.

The Technique of the League of Nations

The technique of the League is the art of organizing conferences. The League of Nations is essentially a series of international conferences, centering on certain permanent machinery like beads strung on a thread. The purpose of the conferences is to work a system of co-operation and peaceful settlement of disputes, whose constitution is the Covenant, and which fifty-three states have pledged themselves to apply by becoming members of the League. The whole constitutes an organized effort at putting international relations on a new basis, by lifting them to the plane of discussion and compromise and keeping them propped up on that plane by obligations so framed as to be directed against the state that tries to revert to force as a way of imposing its view. A discussion of the technique of the League must deal with the intermediate portion of this continuous international effort, with the portion which at the edges shades off into a record of the League's work, a description of its organization and an analysis of the policies of the states members of the League. In other words, it must show the League system in action-how policies are carried out through League machinery and how the existence of the machinery and obligations embodied in the Covenant in their turn react upon the trend of national motives, that is, influence policy; how the nature of international relations is slowly being altered as the League idea and system settle deeper and deeper into the life of the world and gradually edge out war; how an organization of the world is gradually being evolved, not into a federation of nations, much less a super-state or world-state, but into a free association of states, which, although sovereign, have agreed to respect certain mutual rights and assume certain responsibilities.